This invention relates to information technology for convergence of television and the Internet.
There are currently two major developments in the intersection of television and the Internet: Internet TV and cable modem. An Internet TV appliance displays Web pages on a television screen using it as computer monitor and therefore the appliance does not need a separate monitor—an expensive part of PC. Philips Consumer Electronics, Sony Electronics and Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics of America are manufacturing WebTV, a set-top box based on technology developed by WebTV unit of Microsoft. WebTV provides Internet access over dial-up phone modem and does not addresses problems of Internet traffic and slow downloading of multimedia files.
The more important development, cable modem, provides broadband Internet access via cable television line. Pioneering enterprises in the field are At Home, Redwood City Calif., and Road Runner, a joint venture of MediaOne Group of Denver, Microsoft and Time Warner. Cable modem is 100 to 200 times faster in downstream than dial-up phone modem and as a result it eliminates a major Internet bottleneck—so-called “last-mile connection”. Deployment of cable modems necessitates an expensive conversion of conventional one-way cable TV network into two-way addressable network similar to telephone. Satellite television has developed its counterpart of cable modem—DirecPC from Hughes Network Systems, Germantown, Md. DirecPC provides download data rate up to 400 kb/s, which is 10 to 20 times slower than cable modem.
Faster modems eliminate only one Internet bottleneck while explosive grows of number of Internet users, popular portals and high-volume online retail create congestion and, as a result, delays beyond the “last mile”. Moreover, faster modems intensify Web surfing and encourage rich media on Web sites, and thus contribute to Internet traffic on servers and routers. First DSL and cable modem users may experience relief but if most of Internet users go this way the long waiting time will be back.
Popular Web sites experience thousands or even millions of “hits” daily and when they get too busy, additional requests are rejected to avoid excessive delays. This is called “denial of service”. Yahoo, Amazon, e-Bay and some other famous, state-of-the-art sites were shut down by hackers using so-called “denial-of-service attack”. The attack is a flood of artificially created traffic and it constitutes one of the greatest threats because victims have virtually no defense against it. To filter out dummy requests a site needs to detect spoofed return addresses or other suspicious things while hackers are doing everything to make it difficult.
The cause of Internet traffic is addressable delivery: a separate copy of Internet content is delivered to each user even when many users ask for the same content. In a broadcast system such as radio and television there is no traffic because all recipients of the same content are connected (tuned) to the same channel and thus receive the same “copy” of content. This fundamental difference between addressable and broadcast media will exist forever and neither digital compression nor faster modems can eliminate it.
A technology for reducing Internet traffic called “multicast” is promoted as Internet version of broadcast (see Savetz et al. “MBONE: Multicasting Tomorrow's Internet”, IDG, 1996). Multicasting is a technique of sending a packet of data to multiple computers at the same time instead of sending packets to one computer at a time. For implementation of multicast all Internet infrastructure needs to be rebuilt starting with Internet Protocol—the major standard that enables information exchange between different computers throughout the world.
More practical method for reducing Internet traffic is Web caching, i.e. storing frequently accessed Web pages closer to users instead of fetching them each time from original distant sites whenever the pages are requested. Caching software, Inktomi Traffic Server, is available from Inktomi Corp., San Mateo, Calif.
The common feature of the referred prior art is addressable delivery of Internet files. This invention is further development of information technology disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,864,823 and two other pending patent applications by the same applicant. The technology puts together interactivity of the Internet and traffic-free feature of television. As a result, Internet content becomes available for users any time with no delay. In addition, the technology facilitates photographic quality of picture and television quality of video eliminating need in excessive compression that sacrifices resolution. And what is also important, the technology is supplemental rather than intrusive: its implementation does not require any change to existing infrastructure and standards of television and the Internet. The U.S. Pat. No. 5,864,823 claims a system for distribution of multimedia advertisements to interested recipients only over one-way television channels and transmission of orders from recipients to advertisers over the Internet, and a system for electronic delivery of all kinds of high-volume entities such as newspapers, magazines, books, music, video and computer software over television while advancing access data to authorized recipients over the Internet. In pending application Ser. No. 09/179,375 the technology is developed for delivery of Web pages and other high-volume content from Internet sources. The application describes an automatic downloading of Web pages of user's choice at a time of their scheduled transmission via one-way TV channels so that whenever user wants to see such a page it would have been in his computer and therefore presented instantly. In pending application Ser. No. 09/336,846 the technology is further developed to provide also interactive downloading, i.e. immediate downloading on request. The application claims a client/server system in which an Internet client communicates with an Internet server via telephone sending a request for a certain Internet file and receiving back a number of TV channel selected by the server for transmission of the requested file. Then the client switches its channel selector to the TV channel and downloads the file transmitted by the server. If many clients ask for the same file all of them will get it simultaneously from the same channel. In other words, the system combines a two-way addressable exchange of low-volume control information with a one-way broadband broadcast of high-volume content in order to overcome both slow downloading and traffic jams.
This invention presents an improvement of the technology of Internet access via TV channels that further limits two-way addressable exchange between server and clients.